Mirroring recent incidents across the country, including one in Fort Worth, a Muslim student in Ayad Akhtar's astutely observed novel “American Dervish” storms out of a college lecture on the Koran, shouting “in-SULT-ing” and “in-CEN-diary.”

Instead, he asks the cute girl he's crushing on in the back of the room if she knows what it is like to lose her faith. She responds, basically, that you can't lose what you never had. Hayat tells her that it is freeing. “ So freeing.”

Later, having successfully lobbied the young woman for a date, he begins to tell her just how he lost his own faith — at the ripe old age of 12 — when he was studying to become a hafiz, one who has memorized the entire Koran in exchange for Allah's blessings.

“You're Jewish, right?” asks Hayat. “Yeah, so?” “You may not like me very much if I tell you what happened ... ”

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Then Mina comes to live with the family. His mother's best friend since childhood, she escapes an abusive arranged marriage in Pakistan. As beautiful as she is devout, Mina begins to instruct the young man in the proper path to becoming a good Muslim. She tells him about the dervish, a zealous believer that vows to give up everything for Allah.

Meanwhile, Hayat's father, a philandering physician known to have a drink or two, and his mother, a psychologist who frequently (and inappropriately) cries on her young son's shoulder over her husband's cheating (“his white prostitutes”), make battle-royal in the Shah household.

Initially, Mina's presence has a calming effect.

“For once, life in our home was settling into a peaceful, lively rhythm which none of us was accustomed to by nature or experience,” notes Hayat, narrating the story nearly a decade later. “I'm not convinced we were prepared to be happy. After all, we were formed and informed (to various degrees) by an Eastern mythos profoundly at odds with the American notion of happily-ever-after.”

And then Hayat is awakened in the middle of the night by odd noises, and through a partly open bathroom doorway, catches Mina in an (extremely) compromising position. She sees him. “And then she shut the door in my face.”

Hayat redoubles his “Koranic efforts”: “It seemed the only surefire way to earn her love and attention once again.”

Poor kid, he responds to the paradoxes in his life by looking to the more radical, fundamentalist elements of his faith. He vows to become a hafiz, not only to regain Mina, but to save his father from hell's fires (“Seventy years in hellfire. Just for a single drink.”) and his mother from her own hypocrisy (it became “clear to me just how ridiculous it was that she called herself a Muslim.”).

It all blows up in his face.

When Mina, his shining light, falls in love with a Jewish colleague of Father's and makes plans to marry him, Hayat's confusion deepens. He lashes out in unexpected ways, which leads to disaster for those he loves most.

Intelligently written, emotionally charged, “American Dervish” is a loss-of-innocence tale that will leave readers pondering the state of their own faith.

It's early in the year, but it's likely that Akhtar's novel will be on many 2012 best-books lists, including that of the Express-News.